The present invention relates to computer-based document management systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to a computer-based document management system that has the capability of importing, organizing, browsing, searching and viewing paper-based documents and electronic documents of any type or format.
In today""s business environment, most businesses, from small businesses to large corporate entities, organize and maintain a tremendous amount of information, particularly information in the form of paper-based documents and electronic documents. The task of organizing and maintaining such a large number of documents, as well as document types, can, and typically is, a time consuming and costly matter.
In response, the computer industry, particularly the computer software industry, offers a number of computer application programs designed to help mitigate this problem. Some of these computer application programs work in conjunction with optical scanners to automatically import paper-based documents into the host computer. Other application programs are directed more specifically at providing electronic file management services for existing electronic documents. Some of the more advanced computer application programs attempt to integrate a number of different capabilities into a single application program. Among the capabilities that some of the more advanced programs provide are automated document importing, storage, manipulation, retrieval, indexing, archiving, exporting and document annotation. Included among these more advanced application programs are PageKeeper by Caere Inc., PaperPort by Visioneer, and PAGIS by Xerox.
Despite the many features already offered by various software products currently on the market, there is still a tremendous need to provide a more efficient product. This is especially true regarding the way in which existing computer application programs store and/or archive electronic documents. For example, a user may wish to periodically review a document collection for the purpose of identifying documents that have been previously archived. Documents that a user may wish to archive might include documents that the user has not accessed for a long period of time, documents that the user does not anticipate accessing in the near future or on a regular basis, or documents that pertain to a particular business matter or client. If the document collection is extremely large, the task of reviewing, identifying, indexing and archiving each document would be extremely difficult and time consuming even with the computer programs currently available.
Similarly, a user may, on occasion, wish to retrieve one or more electronic documents that have been previously archived onto various removable storage media. Again, if the number of documents and/or the number of removable storage media used to store archived document""s is large, the task becomes quite difficult even with the computer programs currently available. Therefore, a computer-based electronic document-management program that has the ability to efficiently automate the process of identifying, indexing, archiving and retrieving documents to and from various archived storage media would be extremely desirable.
The present invention is directed to a method for managing documents in a computer-based system. The present invention provides a number of improvements over prior methods, particularly, the way in which the present invention indexes, categorizes and stores a wide range of documents and document types in its electronic database.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to automatically index and categorize a large quantity of paper-based and electronic documents and document types. It is another object of the present invention to efficiently and automatically store a large quantity of paper-based and electronic documents.
It is still another object of the present invention to automatically modify and/or manipulate a large quantity of paper-based and electronic documents.
In accordance with one aspect of the present invention, the foregoing and other objects are achieved by a method and/or a computer-readable storage medium stored therein a program for archiving an electronic document. The method and/or program involves defining an archiving precondition, analyzing a document attribute of an electronic document, and archiving the electronic document if the document attribute matches the archiving precondition.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention, the foregoing and other objects are achieved by a method and/or a computer-readable storage medium stored therein a program for retrieving an archived, electronic document. The method and/or program involves selecting an archive index entry and prompting a user to make a particular storage medium available to the computer-based electronic document management system, based upon information stored in the selected archive index entry. An electronic document corresponding to the selected archive index entry is then imported from the particular storage medium.